Covered California - All posts tagged Covered California

While premium hikes may not be as high as feared throughout the country, don’t expect the rest of the nation to follow California’s lead on 2015 Obamacare rates.

That’s the analysis from Peter V. Lee, executive director of Covered California, the state’s health exchange, which is leading the nation in the number of enrollees in the Affordable Care Act. Lee announced Thursday that the average insurance premium price hike for 1.4 million Californians enrolled in private plans through the Obamacare initiative will be roughly 4.2%, with roughly 16% see no increase and a cut in some cases.

Despite concerns that insurance rates would skyrocket by 20% to 30% in year two of the Affordable Care Act, officials supervising the nation’s biggest market for health coverage said Thursday California will see premiums climb by an average of just over 4% for 2015.

The announcement comes on the heels of an analysis from the state’s insurance commissioner, who said that individual plan rates jumped nearly 90% for some policies between 2013 and 2014, when carriers were adjusting their premiums to fit Obamacare guidelines.

The final Obamacare enrollment numbers are in for California, and they show nearly 1.4 million people signed up for health insurance in the state through its Covered California exchange.

State officials say more than 205,000 applications that were started before the March 31 deadline were completed by April 15, which was the cutoff point for being fully enrolled. More than 50,000 applications were completed on the final day. The 1.4 million total exceeds base projections by more than 815,000, officials said.

The final numbers are in on California’s participation in the Affordable Care Act — well, almost the final numbers, that is.

Peter V. Lee, the executive director for Covered California, Obamacare’s incarnation in the Golden State, said Thursday 500,000 people who started the enrollment process online didn’t get a chance to finish. It’s unclear how many of those will sign to public exchanges, Lee says, but the numbers at the end of the Obamacare enrollment period on March 31 are likely to go up.

While the overall effort to enlist consumers in the Obamacare program is falling short of expectations, it seems California’s participation in the program is exceeding forecasts by a wide margin.

State officials said Thursday that its Covered California health insurance exchange had signed up more than 880,000 consumers by the end of February, already well ahead of the base forecast of 560,000 projected for the full six months of open enrollment, which is due to end March 31.

Enrollment among Californians in Obamacare already has surpassed initial projections and is on its way to meeting “enhanced” forecasts, the director of the state’s exchange said Wednesday.

California signed up 728,410 consumers in its state-run exchange known as Covered California through Jan. 31, said Executive Director Peter V. Lee. That’s more than double the enrollees in second-place Florida, which was just shy of 297,000 enrollees, and more than triple that of any other state, according to federal data.

There’s another Obamacare-related computer problem that has surfaced, but this one won’t be as devastating to the Affordable Care Act as those responsible for the program’s rocky start in October.

While the Department of Health and Human Services was touting another 1.1 million enrollees to the nationwide program on Wednesday, Covered California served notice that a Web site designed to help small businesses get their employees insured would have to shut down — for several months.

The story says the FDA’s trials conducted between 2005 and 2012 varied from drug-to-drug, with more than a third, or 36.8% approved after a single trial. The median number of clinical trials was two. A total of 188 new therapies were examined for 206 possible uses.

Halfway through the process, officials running the Obamacare program in California said Tuesday they are close to reaching the minimum expected enrollment for subsidy-eligible consumers and have surpassed the half-million mark in overall signups.

Covered California, the Golden State’s incarnation of Obamacare, says it enrolled 424,936 subsidy-eligible policyholders from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31. Peter V. Lee, Covered California’s executive director, said in a press release that the agency was forecast by independent assessors to reach enrollment at somewhere between 487,000 and 696,000 during the entire signup period, which runs through March 31.

Now that it’s the stretch run for those wanting coverage under Obamacare by Jan. 1, the pace of signups in California is building to a fever pitch, officials in the state said Thursday.

After getting more than 109,000 consumers to apply for plans during the first two months of enrollment, nearly 50,000 more signed up in the first week of December, followed by another 31,000 on Monday and Tuesday, said Peter V. Lee, executive director of Covered California, the state’s health exchange program.

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